Another cold February afternoon found Brady and I back on the slopes of Lookout. We parked at the bottom of the old driveway off Cummings Highway that once led to the Adult Scenic Motel, and walked up the drive to explore some of the old home sites on the hillside sandwiched between the busy modern highway and the much older, now closed Old Wauhatchie Pike just above.
Returning to the truck, we started up the marked trail that winds up to the Wauhatchie Pike Greenway, which we found in bad need of maintenance. At one point the trail was so overgrown that I lost the way. We had walked right by this trail on the Greenway just a couple of weeks before and never seen it, and wouldn't have seen it this time if we hadn't come up it first. Of course, this is just the kind of trail that Brady and I like to hike, feeling our way along as if we are retracing the faded footsteps of history. This would be an easy trail to repair since it is so close to the road; a few hours with the clippers and shovels, some timber for steps and waterbars, and this trail would be a thing of beauty and convenience.
We noted that someone had been bulldozing back the English Ivy at the start of the Greenway to expose two drains--probably a good idea since this area had been flooded last time we visited. There is an old ivy-covered road at this point that climbs diagonally up the northern trestle on the Guild Trail. But my attention was captured by the sight of heavy equipment and piles of gravel up on the old Cravens Road, just to the south. We'd seen a lot of survey stakes up there three weeks ago, and now it looked a major construction project! Since the old Cravens Road up from Wauhatchie Pike was part of the Federal Road, dating back to 1805, I wasn't happy to see it disturbed. (After looking at my map collection last week I realized that if I ever had any doubt about whether this was the Federal (aka Jackson) Road, I was mistaken. At least three different maps showed this was definitely the route: up from Old Wauhatchie, under the northern trestle, then across the slope towards Ruby Falls.)
Up we went, toward an idling truck at the top of the hill. Inside was a friendly fellow who told us he was guarding the equipment for the pipleline company, and all the brouhaha was not construction but simply maintenance on the pipeline. They had laid gravel up the old roadbed to the trestle, and scraped clean some of the adjoining roads, but it appeared no lasting harm would be done. The man was friendly but said he was trying not to fall asleep since other guards had been robbed recently (fortunately, not at this particular location). He made sure we saw the gun on his front seat, but agreed that it was fine with him if we continued looking around the area.
So for the first time in my 22 years of tromping around Lookout I took the paved road to the left and marveled at a long stretch of concrete where something (maybe just a house with a big parking area) had been once. The entire slope of the mountain from here over to the Incline #1 above Chattam had long ago been filled with houses built on terraces. We followed the road along a stone wall visible under the browned kudzu for a hundred yards, trying to imagine it. The first big gully was a whopper, a big swag of ground cleared by the power of kudzu. There were more walls above, but the main road continued down the gully and then back up the other side (connecting with another overgrown road up from a house on Wauhatchie), eventually emerging in another kudzu-filled gully above Church Street and Chattam, the site of Incline #1. If the road Brady and I had explored above the Guild trail near the Incline two weeks ago predated the 1886 railroad bed, then this was almost surely the lower portion of that route. Parts of it still showed old pavement. I stood just below the northern end of the trestle in a spot old photographs from around the 1890s showed a house perched on the hillside; this road would have been its driveway.
Brady and I had gotten separated but both of us were carrying the one essential of modern hiking (the cell phone) so we were soon reunited back at the idling truck of the pipeline guard, who sure enough had fallen asleep. Near the intersection of Cravens and Wauhatchie Pike I noticed what looked like an old millstone that had apparently been used as a yard decoration for a house now long gone. We walked back through John Wilson Park, amazed as always at the juxtaposition of history and nature that seems so inescapable on Lookout Mountain.
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